College Booths

At any given time there are several events being held on a university campus. Recruiting, advertising, celebrating, and organizing are all common themes to the little stands trying to vie for attention as we walk between classes. I currently have two favorite booths.

My second favorite are the "free stuff" guys. Guess what they do? They give away free stuff. I'm sure they do it for some reason like campaigning for their favorite political candidate or AIDS awareness or some craziness like that. I don't know, I've never gone near them. They hand out crap. I mean, I don't want to sound ungrateful to the guys that give away free stuff, but all they're pitching at me is Ramen noodles and toilet paper.

I'm a poor college student; those are the only things I can afford. Oh gee, now that I have free noodles I can takes that 29 cents I just saved and go buy a new iPod. I'll take "Things That Aren't True" for 300, Alex. The time it takes me to change my path and walk 6 feet out of my way is not worth one roll of gravel-textured toilet paper.

Also, when I walk by them, I get these weird flashbacks of my mom telling me not to take candy (and she may have mentioned Ramen) from creepy strangers.

Finally, it would probably help if they didn't bring the free things to campus in a heavily tinted, rust-covered pedo-van.

My new all time, never to be topped favorite booth was one I saw today. (Note: I always get weirded out when I use was and saw in the same sentence. A palindrome once ran over my dog.) I was walking to class and saw a pro-choice stand, which in itself wasn't really out of place: there's political propaganda all over the school. After I'd gone by it, I stopped, turned around and went back to catch the name of the club so I could mention it here (which I failed at because it turns out I didn't care enough).

The weird thing that struck me was that they were luring people to the stand with a piñata. A stand advocating abortion rights was publicizing with a piñata. Think about it. The piñata was in the shape of a little gnome or something, but all I could see when I saw it was a pregnant girl. I asked a friend of mine who happened to be standing there if she thought it inappropriate that a pro-choice stand was using a bat to hit a humanoid effigy in the stomach in order to make the contents spill out the bottom. The irony was lost on her, so maybe I'm over analyzing, but I really felt like it wasn't the most well thought out advertising tool.